Uncounted ballots mean Sonoma County election results may not be final until December

Sonoma County’s elections chief estimated at least 40,000 mail-in and provisional ballots must still be tallied, comprising about a fifth of the vote countywide.|

Sonoma County election officials still need to count at least 40,000 ballots cast in Tuesday’s general election and may not finish tallying the results until their state-imposed deadline in early December.

About 169,600 ballots were counted when the county released results early Wednesday morning with all precincts reporting, reflecting a 62 percent turnout among local voters. The turnout percentage will move higher when the outstanding ballots are tallied, a process that elections officials said would take weeks.

Bill Rousseau, the county’s clerk-recorder-assessor and election’s chief, estimated that up to 50,000 mail-in and provisional ballots remained uncounted. The county will have a more precise estimate of the outstanding ballots today Thursdayafter reporting it to the California Secretary of State, he said.

Rousseau said the remaining ballots were unlikely to change the outcome of most contests in the county. One notable exception could be Measure V, which would ban gas-powered leaf blowers in the city of Sonoma. The measure was leading by only 40 votes Wednesday and final results may not be clear until all votes are tallied by the state deadline, Rousseau said.

Per state law, the county must report final results for presidential electors to California’s Secretary of State by Dec. 6. The county has until Dec. 9 to report results for all other contests.

Once all votes are tallied, turnout may still match Rousseau’s original estimate of about 85 percent but could be lower, he said Wednesday, revising his estimate to between 80 percent and 86 percent.

?“It all depends on the vote-by-mails,” he said.

The county issued nearly 214,000 mail-in ballots this year, accounting for 78 percent of registered voters. Of those ballots, only about 121,200 were returned by Saturday. Before the remaining mail-in ballots can be counted, they need to be sorted, the signatures verified and voters’ names checked against precinct records to make sure voters did not attempt to cast a ballot in person.

The county was among the last in the state to wrap up its precinct results after the polls closed Tuesday night, issuing its last report shortly before 4 a.m. Wednesday, according to the Secretary of State’s website.

High turnout and the lengthy California ballot meant polling locations did not close quickly, Rousseau said.

Adding to the challenge was the county’s system for tallying its paper ballots: After polls close, officials must physically drive the ballots to the Sonoma County Registrar of Voters’ Office in Santa Rosa, where results are tallied using aging vote-counting machines.

“You have to use tender loving care to get those things to process,” Rousseau said. “The biggest reason we were late is we had a big turnout, and we have voting machines that aren’t state of the art, and they don’t go very fast.”

Rousseau said he hoped the county would have upgraded technology by the next statewide election.

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